DATE: Sunday, July 6, 1997                  TAG: 9706260549

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY EUGENE McAVOY 

                                            LENGTH:   70 lines

``LIGHTNING'' SPARKS A COLUMN OF FLAME

LIGHTNING SONG

LEWIS NORDAN

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 273 pp. $18.95.

Lewis Nordan is no stranger to praise. Critic George Garret claims that he is ``among the best American writers in any genre and form.'' His works include two short-story collections and three novels: Music of the Swamp, Wolf Whistle and Sharpshooter Blues. He has won two PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards, the New York Public Library Award for Fiction and the Southern Book Critics Award. In April, he received the Hillsdale Prize for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. If his latest novel, Lightning Song, is any indication, however, Nordan's success is only beginning.

Populated by a cast as quirky as any in American fiction, Lightning Song is the story of 12-year-old Leroy Dearman's awakening to the beauty and betrayal of sex and love. Delightfully befuddled by the adults around him, Leroy slogs innocently through the rain-soaked fields of Mississippi as puberty hovers like a storm cloud behind him. His father Swami Don - crippled in one arm from a childhood gunshot wound inflicted by his father - divides his time between llama farming and moonlighting as a night watchman at a local sporting goods plant. His mother Elsie obsessively clips articles about Aldo Moro's kidnapping from the paper and steals kisses from Harris, Swami Don's brother, in the kitchen. Harris loses himself by sponging off the Dearmans, entertaining the family during his own, private cocktail hour and working his way back into the heart and bed of a wife who threw him out for cheating.

Seemingly unaware of Leroy's awakening curiosity, the adults lose themselves in petty jealousies and deceit. Only the ``New People'' in the town, a husband and wife who have recently lost their 14-year-old son, pay any attention to the intense young boy. As they sort through their grief, Leroy sorts through a stack of soft-core magazines and the emotions that accompany his meeting the town's baton twirler, a buxom 18-year-old redhead with a sexual appetite of her own. After losing his virginity to the baton twirler in an encounter that can only be described as rape, Leroy flees from the grownup lies and lusts that surround him into an early evening storm and is struck by lightning. In that moment of brilliant illumination as he dances with death, Leroy and his family discover the blessing and the burden of having lightning, ``the source of life on our planet,'' in their own backyard, its ``angels of fire'' in their living room.

Lightning Song is short on plot, but long on heart and humor. One part myth and another part fairy tale, it is typical Nordan: intensely touching yet humane, entertaining yet believable. In Leroy, Nordan offers a childhood hero as touching and comical as John Irving's Owen Meany and as probing and poignant as Harper Lee's Scout Finch. His offering, however, is completely original, an intricate orchestration of exceptional characterization and language.

``For a moment,'' Nordan writes, ``after the spider-web thin filament of light hit the raised baton, Leroy did not fall. He became transfixed, a bright image in stasis of a child marching. . . to some private silent music, twirling in the crackling air. He was surrounded by a blue halo. . . The lightning streaked straight through the baton, straight through his whole body, it found its way into the ground by his right heel, which blazed up. He wished he could remember that part, when he walked on a column of flame.''

Lightning Song is Nordan's column of flame, the best in a series of outstanding works. It is not a perfect novel, but to enumerate its flaws is to belie its worth. Like the people it portrays, its imperfections make it stronger. It is as imperfect as parents who must learn each day to love one another again. It is as ragged as the hopes and memories of a 12-year-old boy, and as bizarre as the belief that love can - and sometimes does - last forever. MEMO: Eugene McAvoy is a writer who lives in Norfolk.

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